Vietnamese mint most productive crop

 

Vietnamese mint (Polygonum odoratum) has been the most productive perennial crop I've grown in Wellington, New Zealand (hardiness zone 9), I've tried hundreds of crops (still looking for other crops as productive and hassle free). I've found just one Vietnamese mint in the right spot will spread in a year or two to form a patch around 2 meters wide, it will then stop expanding. These patches repress most or all weeds, even outcompeting the dreaded Tradescantia fluminensis. It can be viewed as a groundcover around 1 m tall.

I've found I can harvest one of these patches to get enough for a decent salad most days of the week year round, new leaves keep being reproduced. I've found they need reasonably moist soil in half shade to be productive like this, clay soil is fine. It will grow on steep slopes as long as there is deep soil. It will survive dryer and sunnier spots but will not be nearly as productive. Finding the right spot may require some trial and error.

Most sources say harvest the younger leaves, older leaves are "too tough" or "too peppery". I've gotten used to eating the large older leaves, they probably require a bit more chewing but I like them most of all, probably for their luxuriant appearance and because they can be harvested more quickly or easily. I agree with advice that the leaves are not good to eat if they turn red but this hardly ever happens to mine, perhaps because of the mild climate. I find the leaves need to be eaten immediately after harvest, they deteriorate quickly if stored, they are also no good cooked in my opinion.  

The flavor is delicious and interesting in my opinion but not liked by everyone, it is mildly hot and peppery. It is good uncooked mixed in with a stir fry, or in a salad. The plant is said to reduce sexual drive, this is completely false in my experience.

Non-domination, Anarchic Societies and Democratic Rule of Law.

 

A review of, and thoughts stemming from, "Anarchic Solidarity: Autonomy, Equality and Fellowship in Southeast Asia. (Yale Southeast Asia Studies Monographs)" Thomas Gibson, Kenneth Sillander Ed. 

This book analyses Southeast Asian societies characterized by personal autonomy, political egalitarianism and social solidarity. They include forest dwelling hunter gatherers, shifting horticulturists, sea nomads and peasants. The editors argue these people live what are unrealized utopian ideals for anarchists in the West.

Although this book is about egalitarian societies it is not really an egalitarian book, it's not written for everyone, or even most people likely to be interested in anarchism or equality, it is an academic book written for academics. But  don't see how egalitarian libertarianism can progress practically without consulting science like this.

This book does not claim to know everything about how anarchic societies work, "we have barely started to understand this other way of life" (page 34), this book is an exploration. At times it was quite fascinating but left me with many questions.

The book does offer a lot of expert insight into how anarchic solidarity is made possible such as though sharing, autonomy in choice of residence and associates and direct access to resources and the active promotion of values such as the obligation to be non-competitive (p75), distrust of the pursuit of high status and rejection of egotism (which is of course virtually the religion in "modern" society). The importance of children as central social glue is also covered (this makes me wonder if charismatic leaders exploit this "weakness" we have for the childlike, charisma has been characterized as immaturity, exhibiting qualities such as extreme narcissism, perhaps it is babies, not elders, who are the origin of hierarchy.)

This book also notes some societies are able to "oscillate" between egalitarian and hierarchical organization (p278), which might be the model most likely to be popular in modern society, people want the stuff hierarchical workplaces create, hospitals, cars, the internet, electricity but they want freedom and equality in how they use these things. I can't see many people wanting to abandon all the "stuff" capitalism and the state produce to be "free in the forest", at least not until all that wonderful "stuff" has wiped out most of the human race and nature.

The book also covers, rather briefly, how these societies deal with rule breakers, this is of course the thing that usually horrifies people about anarchism, that it would let criminals run wild. They do deal with and deter rule breakers in various ways, formal and informal public opinion, avoidance and ostracism and rarely even murder in the case of dangerous individuals (P 30) (socially sanctioned killing is perhaps better described as execution). Murder or execution implies exercising power over someone, so cannot really be construed to be an anarchist means of maintaining social order. As in democratic states enforcement of social norms, especially with extreme violations, unfortunately appears to require forceful actions that would normally be prohibited. It is also interesting that dangerous, difficult individuals do arise in such societies, it would be interesting to know if they are less frequent than in our society, does the suppression of egotism prevent psychopathy developing as often for instance, narcissism being a key component of psychopathy.

Most interesting to me was the belief that disease and catastrophic punishment will be inflicted by supernatural beings for violation of social norms, even just quarreling in some cases. This seems like a problem for most modern anarchists who are usually atheists so would not be able to replicate this. This also does not on the face of it seem like an anarchist means of enforcement, it is hierarchical, it seems to me these supernatural beings are providing the same role as law enforcement in states, including dictatorships in many cases, they don't choose or "elect" many of their supernatural beings and they may hate and fear them. Notably this is also probably a much more effective deterrent than the state as supernatural beings are omniscient unlike the state. ( It is also interesting that even many atheists in modern societies talk, half seriously, about "karma", the universe punishing you for wrongdoing, this tendency to believe in non-human forces dealing out justice may be genetically shared by all of us.) 

Finally, fascinatingly, the universal instinct for dominance Franz de Waal says is found in all primates including humans seems to be marginal at best in these societies, it is "quite wrong.. that human subjects are everywhere driven by the same simple desire to maximize their power" (p 282). What has happened to this instinctive dominance hierarchy with these people? Is it that they appear egalitarian because they are defeated members of the wider population, at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy of societies in SE Asia, as Dentan's essay seems to suggest.

Or have they delegated the alpha male role to supernatural beings, including the law enforcement role alpha males can provide (this is how it looks to me, this is not in the book). This is a very interesting possibility to me, that the alpha male role can be given to a human creation, to "gods". Perhaps this made it possible for humans to share an alpha male, a "god" with different communities over great distances making orderly, civilized relations over great distances possible. This is a bit like the replacement of the alpha by the farmer in domesticated animals (which David Attenborough talked about somewhere).

I think this is like rule of law in democratic states in many respects, we make the ultimate "alpha male" a human creation: written laws. Much like supernatural beings in these egalitarian societies, they are not even alive, are external to all of us and we are all equal before them in a very real sense, this is perverted in various ways such as the rich being able to afford better lawyers of course, but even lawmakers and law enforcers are equally subject to the law.

This was the main novel idea this book gave me, it may be impossible to have human societies without alpha "males" but perhaps democratically created law can be an artificial "alpha male" that serves equality, fellowship and freedom just as gods and spirits do in these societies. Not an idea anarchists have often considered, they are usually so busy hating everything about the state, but you could possibly have laws created by participatory democracy which many argue is potentially consistent with the values of anarchism or non-domination.